Someone with a lot of time on his hands has compiled a 10 minute video purporting to be “A selection of the top 100 quotes from The Wire, the greatest TV show ever made.”

Not surprisingly, virtually all of them contain NSFW language, with the F- and N-words being especially well represented.

via Jason Kottke

Television executives have figured out that people watching their shows via TiVo-delay is a good thing.

Against almost every expectation, nearly half of all people watching delayed shows are still slouching on their couches watching messages about movies, cars and beer. According to Nielsen, 46 percent of viewers 18 to 49 years old for all four networks taken together are watching the commercials during playback, up slightly from last year. Why would people pass on the opportunity to skip through to the next chunk of program content?

The most basic reason, according to Brad Adgate, the senior vice president for research at Horizon Media, a media buying firm, is that the behavior that has underpinned television since its invention still persists to a larger degree than expected. “It’s still a passive activity,” he said. And those passive viewers are watching in numbers big enough to turn some hits (“House” on Fox) into even bigger moneymakers, some middling successes (“How I Met Your Mother” on CBS) into healthier profit centers, and some seemingly endangered shows (“Heroes” on NBC) into possible survivors.

Two years ago, in a seismic change from past practice, Nielsen started measuring television consumption by the so-called commercial-plus-three ratings, which measure viewing for the commercials in shows that are watched either live or played back on digital video recorders within three days. This replaced the use of program ratings.

At the time, network executives fiercely resisted the change, fearing that they would never get credit for recorded shows because viewers would skip through all the commercials. But the figures show otherwise. “It’s completely counterintuitive,” said Alan Wurtzel, the president of research for NBC. “But when the facts come in, there they are.”

Almost across the board, the gains for playback are growing. The best preseason estimate for the current season, said David F. Poltrack, the chief research officer for CBS, was about a 1 percent increase from playback over the live program for the networks combined. Instead, many are in the range of 7 to 12 percent, with some shows having increases of more than 20 percent when DVR ratings are added. The four networks together are averaging a 10 percent increase.

There are two major reasons for DVRing a program:  Time shifting and commercial skipping.  Almost all of us do the former whereas not all of us do the latter.  So it’s only logical that the addition of DVR viewers who don’t fast forward through commercials to the live viewers would be a good thing for the networks.

I’m a pretty aggressive commercial skipper.  For that matter, I’ll fast forward through boring segments of shows (notably, non-political segments of “Saturday Night Live” and the non-roundtable portion of “This Week”).  But even I’ll occasionally forget to grab the remote and accidentally sit through a commercial.   Beyond that, I’ll intentionally watch commercials that may be of interest:  promos for movies that look interesting, funny commercials that I haven’t seen, or products that I’m thinking of buying.

Moreover, with the DVR, I watch far more television than I otherwise would.   I record numerous shows that wouldn’t be appointment viewing “just in case” I have time to watch them.  I also record several shows that are on during hours when my schedule doesn’t allow me to watch television.  And, of course, skipping commercials for products I wasn’t going to buy anyway allows me to view more shows because it’s easier to find a 40-minute window than a 60-minute window.

Individual shows have gained substantially. “House,” second among all shows in its live program rating (to “Grey’s Anatomy” on ABC), became the top show in terms of commercials viewed within three days with a 5.68 rating (about 6.53 million), gaining almost 18 percent. NBC’s comedy “The Office” had one of the single biggest gains — 26 percent from its live program rating — to 3.92 (4.5 million) for its rating including playbacks. The supposedly struggling NBC drama “Heroes” jumped 22 percent, as did another apparently flagging drama, “Fringe” on Fox. And a new ABC drama, the appropriately named “Flash Forward,” looks even more like a hit than it did with its original rating because its rating increased 14 percent with playbacks.

Many serial shows like “Lost” and “Heroes” would be unwatchable as a live show because of annoying and complicated plot twists and an erratic schedule.  But the DVR allows me to get several episodes queued up and watch them in bunches.  (Of course, that doesn’t fit into the 3-day window for the ratings companies.)

One other obvious reason why some shows do better on DVR than live is that the networks often idiotically run their most popular shows against other networks’ most popular shows, forcing live viewers to chose.  DVR viewers can either watch one live and record the other or record both and watch when convenient.

Bernard Chazelle explains “the technical part” of Eric Clapton’s classic “Layla.” Played here with an assist from Mark Knopfler, for those in need of a reminder.

The intro and chorus follow the progression of “All Along the Watchtower” (i-VII-VI-VII-i, ie here, Dm-C-Bb-C-Dm): one of the most common chord sequences in rock (0:27-1:10). The song is in Dm, but the verse begins on a C#m (1:10) ie, its antipode on the cycle of fifths. By rock standards that’s as wild as it gets. In country music, you’ll often hear a singer move up or down by a half-step for no particular reason, as though a boring tune becomes interesting just by virtue of raising its key. But Clapton knows what he’s doing. When he leaves the comfort of Dm for C#m he actually modulates to its relative major E. Just wait: you’ll see there’s method to the madness. Now when he hits the root E (1:17), you should soon be hearing a nice interrogative D (the Mixolydian quest for a change): you need it as a leading tone for the coming F#m (1:18). But Knopfler seems asleep and drops the ball, so the transition is not as compelling as it should be.

The idea then is to go through a perfect cadence twice (ii-V-I-IV, ie, F#m-B-E-A) — the kind of downwind sailing I was talking about earlier. The final A is then used as the dominant of the original key of Dm. It’s all tonally “correct.” If you’ve ever heard of the harmonic minor scale but always wondered what it was about: this is your perfect illustration. In theory, from A the reentry should be to D major, not minor. Of course, home is Dm so Clapton has no choice. The problem is that A has a C#, which is not in the scale of F (the notes of the keys of Dm are given by the scale of F), so hundreds of years ago people invented a new scale called Harmonic (common in Middle-Eastern music), which gives us a leading tone to the tonic, ie, C# -> D. Voila!

That really clarifies things, doesn’t it?

Yeah, I don’t understand it, either.  So why bother posting?  Because of Bernard’s point:

Why I care about such analyses: because it’s a myth to think those guys woke up one day, grabbed a guitar, and composed these tunes. They have in them, as we all do, hundreds of years of cumulative musical sensitivity that was “invented” (not discovered) by people who worked out the theory. That’s what makes western music different from all others. Since the 9th century, it’s been built as a written theoretical construction. The interplay between theory and practice is tighter than in any other art form. So to think of theory as what scholars did after the fact to understand music is naive. In the West, the theory always came first. Don’t forget that.

I think that’s right.  But it doesn’t mean that, for example, Clapton or other guitar virtuosos necessarily understand and of this from a technical standpoint.  But they clearly know it.

via Jim Henley’s secret blog

Nell Scovell, one of a handful of women who has ever worked as a comedy writer for David Letterman — or any of the late night comic talk shows — contends that an atmosphere of sexual harassment routinely exists on those shows:

Without naming names or digging up decades-old dirt, let’s address the pertinent questions. Did Dave hit on me? No. Did he pay me enough extra attention that it was noted by another writer? Yes. Was I aware of rumors that Dave was having sexual relationships with female staffers? Yes. Was I aware that other high-level male employees were having sexual relationships with female staffers? Yes. Did these female staffers have access to information and wield power disproportionate to their job titles? Yes. Did that create a hostile work environment? Yes. Did I believe these female staffers were benefiting professionally from their personal relationships? Yes. Did that make me feel demeaned? Completely. Did I say anything at the time? Sadly, no.

Here’s what I did: I walked away from my dream job. The show picked up my option after 13 weeks; then, about two months later, while looking for a nicer apartment, I realized I didn’t want to commit to a yearlong lease. I’d seen enough to know that I was not going to thrive professionally in that workplace. And although there were various reasons for that, sexual politics did play a major part.

As Rachel Sklar points out, Scovell isn’t some unsuccessful woman blaming her woes on her sex: “She created the TV series Sabrina, the Teenage Witch and has written for Coach, Murphy Brown, Monk, N.C.I.S., Charmed, The Critic, The Simpsons and Newhart. And Late Night with David Letterman.”   Indeed, as Scovell notes in her piece, she was the story editor for Newhart when she was hired to write for Dave.

Melissa McEwan, Don Surber, and Ed Driscoll all bring different perspectives on this but still agree this was sexual harassment.  So do I.

But here’s the thing:  I don’t know what you do about it.

Letterman controls these people’s careers, so for him to have sexual relations with them is problematic and opens him and his company up for lawsuits. Sexuality creates incredible tension and problems in a workplace.  Ideally, then, we would just treat each other as colleagues rather than as potential romantic partners.  But people like this spend an inordinate amount of time at work and attraction does happen. Supervisors and subordinates not only become sexually intimate but fall and love and build lives together. It happens all the time.

In larger offices, this is reasonably easy to fix.  People can move laterally to avoid senior-subordinate relationships.  But in a small team like a 14-person comedy show staff?

Scovell’s solution is to hire more women.  She reports that there are currently zero women working on any of the major shows (Letterman, Leno, and O’Brien — no mention of Colbert and Stewart).   But, as a practical matter, having zero women markedly reduces the chance of sexual harassment!  With more women on the staff — something that otherwise seems a no-brainer given the number of women in the audience — there’s more chance for relationships to form and resentments to foster.

So, there’s the law, human decency, and the way things ought to be.  But there’s also human nature and the power of romantic and/or sexual attraction.  These things often conflict.

Gene Ulm, a partner in my wife’s firm,  points to some facts that I did not know and bet you didn’t either:

You would never know it by reading the rock-and-roll press: metal band AC/DC has sold more records in the U.S. than Michael Jackson or Bruce Springsteen. More than 200 million albums world-wide and trail only the Beatles as the second best selling act EVER. “Back In Black” is the second best-selling album in history – beaten only by The King of Pop’s “Thriller.” Staying power? Last year’s “Black Ice,” was the second best selling album IN THE WORLD.

I knew AC/DC had been quite popular over the decades and that “Back in Back,” which was a monster hit when I was in high school, was one of the biggest albums ever. But I had no idea that the band had sold more records than Michael Jackson domestically.

Gene cites a new book, Why AC/DC Matters, by Anthony Bozza.  Other lists have different rankings.  The RIAA actually has Eagles’ “Their Greatest Hits (1971-1975)” as the top selling album in US history with “Back in Black” a mere 5th; but the albums in third through seventh place vary between 23 and 21 million so the difference is academic.  Plus, the RIAA totals count double albums as two units, skewing the results.

As to the best-selling artists, these lists vary as well and it’s virtually impossible to get accurate figures. Jackson’s sales have exploded since his recent death; he’ll overtake everyone by the time the next list comes out.

Regardless, there’s not much doubt that AC/DC has endured in popularity for going on forty years despite drastic changes in the field of popular music and the death of the lead singer who first brought them to international acclaim.  And they’ve done so without the aid of ballads, which are much more likely to generate enduring hits that cross genres.  Further, as Gene notes, “the band did all this while being virtually ignored by the music press. They’ve never won a Grammy or MTV Music Award and have only been on the cover of Rolling Stone twice in 35 years.”

Even the likes of KISS and Metallica ultimately earned critical acclaim over time — simple respect for lasting success.  For whatever reason, that’s eluded AC/DC.

Megan McArdle points me to this amusing video about which  Gizmodo’s John Herrmann gushes, “I’ve read the articles, watched the instructional videos, and gotten an invite, but nothing—nothing—has done more to explain to me how this mind-melting Internet Thing works than Pulp Fiction, spectacularly adapted for Google Wave. (Warning: Tarantino language ahead)”

It’s an entertaining illustration but, frankly, not one that makes me pine for an invite.  Yes, Wave would seem to combine several existing tools in a streamlined way.  And it might be extraordinarily useful way of doing certain kinds of collaborative work.  Mostly, though, it looks like a big time-waster.

I’m getting the distinct sense that Slate’s Double X spin-off is some sort of elaborate spoof rather than a smart, female-centric magazine.  Yesterday, via Julian Sanchez, I came across their insipid advice column saying it pushed the “limits of friendship” to expect one’s friends to not leave you for dead after you’d been administered a date rape drug.  Today, via Jason Kottke, I see that they’re experimenting with drinking like the cast of “Mad Men” to see how it would impact running their insipid magazine.

Apparently, these women have no previous exposure to alcohol, no understanding of how alcohol affects the human body, and no concept of elapsed time as portrayed on a one-hour drama.

The gals are completely hammered after a single morning Bloody Mary and act like a bunch of sorority girls at the ensuing meeting. (Scientific disclaimer:  Not having witnessed their meetings otherwise, this may be completely normal and not an effect of alcohol.)  This, despite the fact that they’re still drinking said beverages during the meeting. (Incidentally, I don’t recall any of the boys of Sterling Cooper drinking Bloody Marys during the workday — much less during morning staff meetings.)

The gals then have martinis at lunch. This is completely kosher: Roger Sterling did this frequently during the first two seasons of the show. But, unlike the silver haired name partner in the fictional advertising firm, the ladies of our virtual magazine are now completely unable to have coherent conversations.

Now, I tend not to drink much during the workday. On rare occasions, I’ll have a beer or two at lunch and sometimes I’ll do some more writing after a 5:00 martini on a Friday. Afterward, I function reasonably well doing intellectually demanding work. Then again, I’m not a novice drinker. And, like the more serious drinkers on “Mad Men,” I’m well over 200 pounds. It’s not polite to talk about women’s weight but I will boldly conjecture, having seen the video, that Hanna Rosen, Emily Bazelon, and the other Double Xers go considerably below that.

This, naturally, matters. Consider these charts from Virginia Tech:

Leave aside the issue of legal limits for operating a motor vehicle, which are the subject of some controversy. We see that small women are generally “significantly affected” by the first drink and even women in the 140-pound range are quite heavily intoxicated by the third drink in a relative short period. By contrast, a 200 point man doesn’t reach the .10 level until the 6th drink!  And notice that there are two charts:  There’s no gender equality in this game.

Rosen says “The Mad Men do this 40 times a day.” No. They don’t.

My wife chides me all the time for picking nits with logical inconsistencies in television shows and movies, telling me I should just suspend my disbelief because IT’S JUST A TV SHOW. So, perhaps I shouldn’t cast any stones on that front. Still, I’m fully cognizant of the fact that a one-hour television episode typically does not represent one hour in real time. Indeed, violating this convention is what made “24″ novel. A typical “Mad Men” show takes place over a week or more.

Don Draper and Roger Sterling might have six drinks over the course of a very long workday that extends deep into the evening. But they’ll have had maybe 2 or 3 in the course of a two hour lunch, be completely sober in time for the 5′oclock cocktail, and then pace themselves throughout a long evening during which they’ll have a very heavy meal rich in protein. Metabolically, there’s no reason they can’t maintain that pace indefinitely without being significantly impaired.

Overall, the show does a realistic job of portraying alcohol and its abuse. The junior staffers, apparently not having built up their tolerances, are frequently rather inebriated on the show by the end of the day. As the Double X ladies giggle about over lunch, one of the senior execs is depicted as a drunk who winds up fired after embarrassing himself because of his problem. Another major character is a recovering alcoholic who falls back off the wagon to his peril. Early in the current season, an executive is maimed and his career ruined by a stupid, alcohol-inspired act of an employee.

It’s not all fun even on a show that seems to glorify the good old days of being able to drink at work.

Peter Suderman and Berin Szoka provide sane, libertarian arguments against the Nanny State regulating the volume of television commercials.  While they both find the longstanding practice where the ads are several decibels higher than the surrounding programming annoying, they nonetheless argue that it’s not a matter where government should intervene.

Says Suderman,

It’s easy enough to turn your TV off (or even live without one, as Szoka does). And if that’s too arduous, there are various technological solutions from companies like Dolby and SRS that help keep TV volumes on a more even keel.

[...]

But the larger problem is the assumption this grows out of — that government’s job is to regulate every minor annoyance out the lives of its citizens. That’s bad for government, because it gives it unnecessary power and distracts it from legitimate government activity. It’s also worse for citizens, who develop an implicit sense that, when problems arise, the way to fix them is to beg Congress, pass a law, wait for new irritations to arise, then wash, rinse, repeat. And  in the end, I think that’s far more grating and obnoxious than a little volume manipulation from advertisers on the idiot box.

Szoka notes that proposed legislation is technically unsound and subject to selective enforcement.  And there’s the issue of freedom:

[T]he bill does embody a recurrent presumption that it’s ok to regulate advertising in ways we wouldn’t accept for the “show” itself (i.e., non-advertising content). Of course, the show could be “commercial” (which, in First Amendment terms, means it would generally get only “intermediate” scrutiny) while the advertisement could be “non-commercial”—such as a political ad. But even if most ads are commercial, so what? If the government is going to protect us from “noisy or strident” commercials, why not all “noisy or strident” programming? Even the most annoying TV ad is probably less annoying than, say, the James Carvilles of the world debating the Glenn Becks of the world. (Of course, users really bothered by noise, but unwilling to give up TV, would probably much rather have a dynamic market for TVs with volume moderating features than rules that dull the din of commercials alone.)

Kevin Drum doesn’t care. He just wants the noise to stop.

[B]laring TV commercials have been an obvious and fixable problem for several decades and no “basic harmony of interests” has yet manifested itself.¹ This suggests to me that it never will unless the industry is pressured into doing it.

[...]

¹A shortcoming, by the way, that’s made worse by the artistic decisions of certain shows.  The worst for me is 24, which I have to crank up in order to hear the hoarse stage whisper that Kiefer Sutherland affects in his Jack Bauer role.  The ads are loud even at the best of times, but they’re really loud when you’ve already turned up the volume just to hear the show itself.

²This is an issue, like the Do Not Call registry, that transcends politics.  I don’t really care whether volume regulations are liberal or conservative or trample the Bill of Rights or whatever.  I just want the noise to stop.  If it takes jackboots to stop it, then so be it.

While I’m naturally in the Suderman-Szoka camp on the issue of Nanny Statism, Drum has persuaded me on this one with the strength of his footnotes.

The fact of the matter is that the federal government has regulated the manner in which television has been broadcast since before we were broadcasting television. (The Radio Commission, the forebear of the FCC, predates television.)  They regulate the spectrum on which broadcasters operate, require a certain amount of “public interest” programming as a condition of licensing, require a certain amount of “truth in advertising,” restrict the use of coarse language and images in over-the-air broadcasts, and otherwise oversee many aspects of what’s shown on television.   Why shouldn’t they set parameters on something that genuinely annoys most of us?

This isn’t a free speech issue. It doesn’t impinge on speech in any way. It merely requires that broadcasters refrain from blaring the ads.

Government already regulates the content of commercial speech, which has long been less protected than political speech.  Indeed, those of us over a certain age can recall the days when those advertising ladies’ undergarments had to use mannequins to demonstrate their wares.  Or that it took the AIDS epidemic to get the FCC to allow advertising for condoms — or, hell, the use of the word “condom.”

Yes, I suppose consumers could invest in sophisticated technology to solve this annoyance.  But why should we have to do that?

David Letterman was the victim of an extortion attempt and took a novel approach: going public.

Michael Schneider for Variety:

On the show, Letterman sat down behind his desk and asked his audience whether they wanted to hear a story — and the crowd enthusiastically cheered, not knowing what they were about to hear.

According to the host first received a package three weeks ago from someone who claimed to have information about alleged sexual relations he has had with female employees of the “Late Show.” “I get to looking through it and there’s a letter in the package and it says, ‘I know that you do some terrible, terrible things. And I can prove that you do these terrible things.’ Sure enough, contained in the package was stuff to prove that I do terrible things,” Letterman said on Thursday’s edition of CBS’ “Late Show.”

The host said the alleged extortion suspect claimed he planned to write both a movie screenplay and a book based on what he knew — that Letterman had engaged in sex with staffers. “He’s going to take all the terrible stuff he knows about my life — and according to this packet, there seems to be a lot of terrible stuff he knows about — and he’s going to put it into a movie unless I give him some money,” he said. “That’s a little hinky. I just want to reiterate how terrifying this moment is. Because there’s something very insidious about, is he standing down there, is he hiding under the car, am I going to get a tap on the shoulder?”

Letterman said the individual threatened to go public with the allegations unless Letterman paid the person $2 million. The host, under advisement of his attorney, met with the man on three different occasions. According to Letterman, the suspect even made it clear he knew what he was doing was illegal. Letterman told his audience that he then contacted the Manhattan District Attorney’s Special Prosecution Bureau.

They then set up a sting operation, arrested the perpetrator, and Letterman testified before a grand jury.

As part of the testimony, Letterman admitted that he had engaged in sexual relationships with staff members. “My response to that is, yes I have. Would it be embarrassing if it were made public? Perhaps it would,” Letterman said. “Especially for the women. But that’s a decision for them to make if they want to come public and talk about the relationships.

And:

This is not the first time Letterman has been the victim of an extortion attempt. Police revealed a plot in 2005 to kidnap Letterman’s baby son, Harry, for a $5 million ransom. House painter Kelly Frank was later charged with the crime. Letterman has been married to Regina Lasko, the mother of his child, since March. The two have dated since 1986.

Letterman has also been a stalking victim.  All of which, I suppose, is the bizarre price of celebrity.   And it gets more bizarre, if this Radar report is accurate.

An NYPD source has told RadarOnline.com that the suspect under arrest in the David Letterman extortion case was a producer for CBS’s 48 Hours, Robert Halderman. Halderman often went by his middle name Joe and currently has a residence in Connecticut.

[...]

RadarOnline.com has also learned that the alleged extortionist lived with one of the woman who David was involved with. The affair happened a long time ago, before his son Harry was born, and before he got married, but he was living with his wife to be at the time.

AllahPundit wonders, “Why acknowledge the extortion on the show, though? Even if the news broke in the papers, a studious silence would have led at least some people to believe that the accusations against him were bogus.” Presumably, going public gets the story behind him more quickly and garners some sympathy. Plus, he clearly doesn’t seem to be embarrassed by his own misdeeds here.

Glenn Reynolds‘ post noting “The Wizard of Oz turns 70 years old” was the latest of what is becoming for me an all-too-frequent occurrence: reading a completely different context and being momentarily confused.   My immediate reaction was “There’s no way in hell Ozzie Smith is 70.”   (He turns 55 the day after Christmas, making him older than I’d have guessed.)

Of course, it’s the movie “The Wizard of Oz” that dates to 1939.

Joshua Foust continues to call attention to widespread and institutionalized child rape — mostly man-on-boy — in Afghanistan, this time with a report that Canadian soldiers had been quietly told to ignore the practice because we needed the cooperation of the leaders doing the raping. Steve Hynd, naturally, wonders why this isn’t widely reported and why senior U.S. officials aren’t being asked about American policy on this troubling issue.

Meanwhile, Jim Henley (via Google Reader) encapsulates my immediate reaction: “This problem could be solved if the Afghan security forces would make a few well-regarded movies.”

Snark aside, this just highlights the impossibility of our mission in Afghanistan.  How, precisely, are we to inculcate a Western-style civil society in a culture so utterly barbaric?

A well-done Star Trek – Monty Python mashup:

via Glenn Reynolds

Roman Polanski, who fled the United States in 1977 after conviction for raping a 13-year-old, has been arrested in Switzerland and is fighting extradition to Los Angeles.

Polanski, who fled the United States in 1978, was detained Saturday after arriving to receive a lifetime achievement award at the Zurich Film Festival. It was not clear why U.S. authorities had chosen this moment to act on Polanski, 76, a regular visitor to Switzerland with a house here.

“We are going to demand his release and we are going to defend ourselves against the reasons for the extradition procedure,” Herve Temime, Polanski’s lawyer, told French daily Le Figaro. “It seems indefensible that 30 years after the fact a 76-year-old man who has shown no evidence of any danger to society and whose reputation … is well established, can spend a single day in prison,” Temime said.

It’s hardly unusual that someone convicted of a felony who fled the country to avoid punishment would be sought after. But, oddly, this sentiment is shared by WaPo columnist Anne Applebaum, who terms the arrest “outrageous.”

Here are some of the facts: Polanski’s crime — statutory rape of a 13-year-old girl — was committed in 1977. The girl, now 45, has said more than once that she forgives him, that she can live with the memory, that she does not want him to be put back in court or in jail, and that a new trial will hurt her husband and children. There is evidence of judicial misconduct in the original trial. There is evidence that Polanski did not know her real age. Polanski, who panicked and fled the U.S. during that trial, has been pursued by this case for 30 years, during which time he has never returned to America, has never returned to the United Kingdom., has avoided many other countries, and has never been convicted of anything else. He did commit a crime, but he has paid for the crime in many, many ways: In notoriety, in lawyers’ fees, in professional stigma. He could not return to Los Angeles to receive his recent Oscar. He cannot visit Hollywood to direct or cast a film.

He can be blamed, it is true, for his original, panicky decision to flee. But for this decision I see mitigating circumstances, not least an understandable fear of irrational punishment. Polanski’s mother died in Auschwitz. His father survived Mauthausen. He himself survived the Krakow ghetto, and later emigrated from communist Poland. His pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, was murdered in 1969 by the followers of Charles Manson, though for a time Polanski himself was a suspect.

Rape isn’t a tort; it’s a felony. So whether the victim wishes to press charges is irrelevant except as to the practicalities of securing a conviction, which isn’t a problem in this case since Polanski pled guilty.

Patrick Frey, an assistant district attorney in LA whose office is seeking Polanski’s extradition, notes that Polanski “pled guilty to unlawful sex with a minor, in return for the agreement to dismiss several other charges, including rape and sodomy.”  He and a co-blogger remind us of the graphic details of the case, which belie the notion that Polanski is some sort of victim. Let’s just say that the girl in question was drugged and the encounter was otherwise decidedly less than romantic.  See also the victim’s grand jury testimony, which makes clear the sex was forcible and that, even drugged with alcohol and Quaaludes,  she explicitly denied consent.  Which, of course, a 13-year-old can not give under the law.  (In a separate post, Frey notes that Applebaum’s husband is Poland’s foreign minister, who is lobbying for Polanski’s release.)

Oddly, Applebaum’s view on this matter is hardly unique. He’s being portrayed as a hapless victim and a harmless 76-year-old being hounded for no particular reason. And, while I’m generally dubious of putting old men in jail for crimes they committed decades earlier and have shown no propensity to commit again, I’m rather loathe to reward confessed child molesters for fleeing the country.  (Kieran Healy, generally to my left politically, also sneers at Polanski defenders:  “Puritanical Americans simply do not have the enlightened attitude toward wine at the dinner table, quaaludes, and child rape that the Europeans do.”)

Oh, as to the horrible price he’s paid in “professional stigma,”as Applebaum’s own post notes, he was in Switzerland to pick up a lifetime achievement award and had recently won the Academy Award, the highest honor in his industry.  He’s received countless other accolades and has, one presumed, earned millions and lived a life of high luxury.  So, I’m hard pressed to feel sympathy for his three decades of suffering.  Certainly not on the basis of having to avoid countries with extradition treaties to the United States, which would be akin to sympathizing with the murderer of his parents on the grounds he’s an orphan.

UPDATE:  Alex Knapp points me to this quote from Kate Harding, which rather well encapsulates my thoughts:

The point is not to keep 76-year-old Polanski off the streets or help his victim feel safe. The point is that drugging and raping a child, then leaving the country before you can be sentenced for it, is behavior our society should not — and at least in theory, does not — tolerate, no matter how famous, wealthy or well-connected you are, no matter how old you were when you finally got caught, no matter what your victim says about it now, no matter how mature she looked at 13, no matter how pushy her mother was, and no matter how many really swell movies you’ve made.

Quite.

UPDATE:  David Gibson, bemused that so many in Europe and the Hollywood community share Applebaum’s view, wonders what the reaction would be were Polanski a Catholic priest rather than a filmmaker.

But what if Roman Polanksi were wearing a Roman collar? Would “Monsignor Polanksi” receive the same considerations? As Father Thomas Reese, a Jesuit, writes at the Post’s “On Faith” site, “Imagine if the Knights of Columbus decided to give an award to a pedophile priest who had fled the country to avoid prison. The outcry would be universal.” And rightly so, as Reese says. But Polanski gets an Oscar in absentia in 2003 and earns sympathy because he can’t receive it in person.

I’m a couple days behind on my “Daily Show” viewing but Ed Morrissey points me to this clip of his reaction to the ACORN scandal, in which the community organizers offer helpful advice to a fake pimp-hooker combo in evading criminal detection and claiming their underage Central American sex slaves as dependents on their taxes.

Ed gives rightful kudos to Jon Stewart and his audience for their horror at this situation despite the fact that ACORN is ostensibly on their side. But it doesn’t surprise me at all.  Stewart makes no bones about his liberal politics but he’s always struck me as a decent and fair guy.  Of course he’s outraged that his tax dollars are going to scumbags.  And he catapulted himself to household name status years ago with his takedown on the “Crossfire” culture, so it’s certainly no surprise that he’s disgusted that the mainstream press didn’t break this long ago.

Steve Benen and DougJ give NewsBusters’ Tim Graham a hard time for noting that the Washington Post obituary for Patrick Swayze, who died overnight from pancreatic cancer, fails to give “Red Dawn” its due, quipping, “There are clearly no fortysomething Reaganites working in the Washington Post newsroom.”

I was prepared to chide Benen and DJ for failing to get a self-deprecating joke, titling the original draft of this post “A Wolverine Ate Their Sense of Humor,” until I clicked through and read Graham’s original.  Sadly, his irony must be too subtle for me as well, as he titles the post “WaPo Patrick Swayze Obit Gets to His Drag-Queen Movie Before ‘Red Dawn’” and begins “Here’s a sign the Washington Post is a liberal newspaper.”  Later, he observes,

“Red Dawn” was not a prestigious film, but it was a breakout lead role for Swayze, and a completely shocking product coming out of a Hollywood: a movie about American teens fighting a resistance against a Soviet invasion of the United States.

While I haven’t seen the movie since college, I do recall it being quite enjoyable, although not as much so as “Taps,” another kids-go-martial flick of the same era.  But it’s not the sort of thing a film critic is going to gush over.  Heck, they even give short shrift to my favorite Swayze movie, “Next of Kin,” for reasons I perfectly understand.

Regardless, Swayze made quite a few good movies and seemed like a pretty good fellow.  It’s a shame that he died so young.